Updated, August 12: Microsoft has now responded to the Secure Boot blooper.
The company said: "The jailbreak technique described in the researchers’ report on August 10 does not apply to desktop or enterprise PC systems. It requires physical access and administrator rights to ARM and RT devices and does not compromise encryption protections."
Original Story
Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key"—which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets.
The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with
Secure Boot enabled.
And while this means that enterprising users will be able to install any operating system—Linux, for instance—on their Windows tablet, it also allows bad actors with physical access to a machine to install bootkits and rootkits at deep levels. Worse, according to the security researchers who found the keys, this is a decision Microsoft may be unable to reverse.
The golden keys were found by
MY123 and
Slipstream in March this year. They've just posted, on a rather funky website, a
description both of Microsoft's security errors and of its seeming reluctance to patch the issue. The researchers note that this snafu is a real-world demonstration of the lack of wisdom in the FBI's recent demands for universal backdoors in Apple's devices. They wrote:
A backdoor, which MS put in to Secure Boot because they decided to not let the user turn it off in certain devices, allows for Secure Boot to be disabled everywhere! You can see the irony. Also the irony in that MS themselves provided us several nice "golden keys" (as the FBI would say)
for us to use for that purpose :)
About the FBI: are you reading this? If you are, then this is a perfect real world example about why your idea of backdooring cryptosystems with a "secure golden key" is very bad! Smarter people than me have been telling this to you for so long, it seems you have your fingers in your ears.
You seriously don't understand still? Microsoft implemented a "secure golden key" system. And the golden keys got released from MS['s] own stupidity. Now, what happens if you tell everyone to make a "secure golden key" system? Hopefully you can add 2+2...
